New Books in Economics

JC de Swaan does not shy from a challenge. In his new book, Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry (Cambridge University Press, 2020), de Swaan, argues that it is possible to work in finance and not fall prey to the worst ethical ills of a profit maximizing industry. A lecturer at Princeton and partner in at Wall Street hedge fund, de Swaan spent years chronicling examples of virtuous behavior in finance. He distills his research into four "pillars" of...

What are the limitations of relying on logic as an upfront filter in pursuing ideas? Find out as I talk to Rory Sutherland about his new books Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life (William Morrow, 2019) Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, a legendary advertising agency. He’s also a columnist for The Spectator and a past president of the London-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). His TED Talks have been viewed over 6.5...

Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath. In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how...

For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis,...

John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small-business entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem of contemporary rural Japan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan has been experiencing an unprecedented decline in population that is expected to accelerate over the coming decades. Rural areas, in particular, have been at...

Modern finance isn't really all that modern. Three centuries ago, Great Britain's need for money to fight its wars, the appearance of joint stock companies, and the emerging quantification of all aspects of life converged to create new notions and forms of money and investments. And then there was a spectacular bubble in 1720. The South Sea stock rose and fell quickly, but the financing structures remained and last to this day in evolved form. In his new book Money for Nothing: The...

The work of Alfred Charles Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his book The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (Princeton University Press, 2017), over the course of his long career Pigou advanced ideas that remain very relevant today. As Kumekawa describes, Pigou entered the field of economics at an important point in its evolution. As a student of Alfred Marshall,...

For seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervised twenty-one films, grossing $2 billion in worldwide box-office. In his new book, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business (Post Hill Press, 2020), Fenton shares not only his journey from waiting tables at the Olive Garden to producing...

Gene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all in his hometown of York, PA. So he gathered the country's best and brightest in 2019 for a conference at Yale Law School to come up with specific policy proposals that can reverse that process. The details of what has happened make for difficult but necessary reading. In The Vanishing American...

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully...

How does any organization invite the true, full participation of its members? In his new book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), Timothy Clark explains. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, and ranks as a global authority on senior executive development, strategy acceleration and organizational change. He’s the author of five book, and over 150 articles. Clark earned a doctorate degree in Social Science from...

Dr. Shahrukh Khan's new textbook Development Economics: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2019) is a fantastic book for teachers and students trying to get into the field of development economics. Covering all the major topic in the field such as foreign direct investment, foreign aid, institutions and good governance, data collection, and heterodox approaches the book immerses the reader into fundamental questions of development and underdevelopment. What sets this work apart is both the...

Today's guest is Christopher Robertson, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. His background and research interests overlap several academic disciplines, including bioethics, health law, incentives, behavioral economics and more. His CV includes a PhD in philosophy and a law degree from Harvard. His newest book is Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What can be Done About (Harvard University Press, 2019). Colin Miller...

I spoke with Prof. Christopher Marquis, Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Global Sustainable Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University. His latest research book tells the story of an ambitious certification programme that aims to signal to customers and shareholders those small and large corporations that are responsible and caring with their workers, customers, with the planet and the local communities where they operate. Businesses have a big role to play in a capitalist...

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them. By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century,...

Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas--climate related and non-climate related--to their policy prescriptions. Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much...

In 2007, Ecuador joined the Latin American “Pink Tide” by electing a left-wing president, Rafael Correa, who voiced opposition to US imperialism and advocated higher levels of redistribution and social investment. However, shortly after coming to power, Correa came into conflict with members of his own coalition over the future of resource extraction in the country. Should Ecuador try to leverage its mineral wealth and oil fields to promote social welfare and human development, or should the...

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of ideas and policies espoused by political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs to reform the French empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Due to this diffusion of observations and ideas, French economic philosophers who called themselves “economistes” and...

Capitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of a general economic ‘recovery.’ More recently, the tensions and shortcomings of our current socioeconomic system have been exacerbated by the COVID-crisis, with poorly compensated frontline workers struggling to stay safe in workplaces that have failed to take adequate care of their health and...

What is money? No, really, what is money? It turns out the answer is not so simple. During the course of the 20th century, most of us have gotten used to the notion of a single medium of exchange based on Federal Reserve notes which we call dollars. They look the same, feel the same, and have the same use everywhere in the country. We are so comfortable with that medium of exchange that we are now increasingly doing away with the paper and accepting a digital version of said money. The...